Complexity of enterprise networks has increased to a point where even information technology (IT) administrators may not be aware of the computing and storage resources on which mission-critical applications of the organization are running on.
Enterprise networks consist of computing and storage resources designed to run business-related applications of an organization. Applications of the enterprise network, include for example email service, web service, database, customer relationship management (CRM), data file, virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI), enterprise resource planning (ERP), and the like.
Enterprise networks are increasingly moving towards a combination of on-premise and cloud-based infrastructure, making the ability to determine computing and storage resources associated with business-related application more difficult.
Corporations demand acceptable levels of performance, reliability, redundancy, and security from its computing and storage devices. One way to achieve performance, reliability, and redundancy is to provide more resources than the computing environment would ever need. Unfortunately, the cost of information technology equipment, software and personnel can be prohibitively expensive, and runs contrary to an overall goal of an enterprise of profitability. Every corporation must strike a balance between their the cost of additional computing and storage versus performance, reliability and redundancy benefits of the additional computing and storage resources.
One way for IT administrators to monitor aspects of the increasingly complex enterprise network is with assistance from a wide variety of standalone and integrated software tools available to aid in the monitoring various aspects of the enterprise network. These tools include standalone software such as IT management software, application performance software, and software to create a server-based storage area network.
For example, software-defined storage products allow enterprises to create a server-based storage area network (SAN) from local application server using existing storage devices. These software-defined storage products have the capability to convert direct attached storage (DAS) into shared block storage, may be installed in existing storage devices, and may be integrated into storage devices produced by certain manufacturers. However, different standalone or integrated software may capture data regarding different aspects of the enterprise network. For example, IP network traffic may provide data such as the speed of each hop from the router to a host, but would not capture data regarding attributes of the host such as the operating system running on the host, or CPU usage of the host. Furthermore, data provided by each standalone or integrated software may be viewed on their own platform, and may be isolated from one another, making it difficult to monitor the performance, health and capacity of entities of the enterprise network. The entities of the enterprise network include applications, storage arrays, virtual machines and the like.
In one example involving difficulty of identifying the root of a problem, a user of an enterprise network complains of slow response of the virtual desktop application of the enterprise network. The IT administrator may run a diagnostic, using storage performance monitoring tools, on one or more storage resources on which the VDI application is known to be running. The storage performance monitoring tool may determine that no storage performance problem exists. A common response to the issue may be to increase the storage array capacity of the enterprise network, which may not result in an improvement in response time of the storage array. The software integrated in routers of the enterprise network may not be able to pin point reasons for the slow response of the VDI application, since this software would only have access data regarding traffic on the routers, and not the performance of other entities of the VDI application connected to the routers.